Joe Scarborough: Obama SCOTUS attacks ‘demagoguery,’ ‘disturbing’

On Tuesday’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough was strongly critical of President Barack Obama’s decision to preemptively attack the Supreme Court now that his health care reform legislation is in danger of being overturned.

Scarborough reminded viewers of how former Texas Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay made a push to impeach federal judges in the 1990s, and said that Obama’s Monday remarks on the judiciary were similar.

“He wants them to stay in their own lane,” Scarborough said. “It is one thing if a former past control exterminator named Tom DeLay decides to go around saying he’s going to impeach federal judge if they don’t agree with him and for other Republicans to bash the activist court because I can tell you what — while that was happening, the lawyers in that body that had sat through constitutional law on the Republican side were with me. We would sit in the back of the room and we would grimace going ‘It’s separation of powers and this is very frightening.’”

However, the difference according to Scarborough was that DeLay got his start in the pest control business with Redwood Chemical and Albo Pest Control, which he grew into successful companies. But Obama had a background in constitutional law, having been both president of the Harvard Law Review and a law professor at the University of Chicago, which suggests he would have more respect for the Supreme Court.

“But again, this is important to say, for a constitutional lawyer to try to blur the lines of separation of power, and I go back — I was disturbed,” Scarborough said. “I know progressive jurists who were disturbed when the president used the state of the union address to call out Supreme Court members on the front row. This is a president that obviously has forgotten much of what he learned at some of the best legal institutions in America.”

“This is demagoguery,” Scarborough continued, “which I expect from former pest control people who don’t understand the beauty of the American judicial system. But, for a president to do it, this is really disturbing.”